Eyeborg film-maker gets his implant

Five months after saying he wanted to embed a camera in his eye, Rob Spence has taken the first step towards becoming an eyeborg.

A former SpaceX avionics systems engineer, Kosta Grammatis, has designed a prototype of the eye camera, which Spence has implanted in his eye socket.

"If you lose your eye and have a hole in your head, then why not stick a camera in there?" he said in January. "The eyes are like no other part of the body. It's what you look into when you fall in love with somebody and [it influences] whether you trust someone or not. With a video camera in there, it will change how people see and perceive me."

The designers of the eye camera had to design an eyeball chassis that could form a watertight seal when closed. Traditional prosthetic eyes are made from a solid piece of polymethyl-methacrylate, a flexible polymer used in dentures, but this prosthetic had to be hollow in order to hold the camera.

Phil Bowen, the prosthetic-maker who worked on the project, said that the modified eye will be heavier than a normal human eyeball, and that the extra weight could affect the eye socket, says Bowen. "The weight might stretch out the lower lid," he says, potentially disfiguring the face.

Grammatis had to create a camera module and transmitter that would fit into the prosthetic to broadcast the video footage that Spence captures as he looks around him. The first footage from the Eyeborg, which is a little hazy at the moment, is below (along with rather gruesome footage of the implant process):